»In the matter of tango it is always very precarius to express an opinion. The risk to claim something fallacious about the tango or to offend living or dead historical persons of the genre is immense. It´s no valid question whether Carlos Gardel is an Argentinian or Uruguayan by birth - in fact it seems natural to assume that by Gotan Project the fourth tango revolution has taken place.«

What is neotango? And if so how many? A polemic to the relation of neotango and Retro Tango »In the matter of tango it is always very precarius to express an opinion. The risk to claim something fallacious about the tango or to offend living or dead historical persons of the genre is immense. It´s no valid question whether Carlos Gardel is an Argentinian or Uruguayan by birth - in fact it seems natural to assume that by Gotan Project the fourth tango revolution has taken place.« Philippe Cohen Solal, Gotan Project The guess that Diego Siegelwachs supposed in his article of 2007 »GOTAN PROJECT and the fourth tango revolution« unmistakable has been proved to be true.(cf. http://www.alolatino.de) »La Revancha del Tango« of Gotan Project in 2001 marks not necessarily historically, but stylistically the birth of the neotango, to a trendy, danceable style mix of the tango with electronic beats and sounds. The neotango has lined up to burst open the congealed musical, dance-like,

social and communicative conventions of the tango of the 80th and 90th. Comparable to the formation of the jazz it melts the tango with impulses of the broad range of the contemporary youth culture, revitalises itself and regains its basic liveliness, power of innovation and improvisation.In this process it meets with disapproval by the exponents of the soi-disant »Tango Argentino « which refers his identity to the classicistic zenith of the Tango Ríoplatense, to the Tango d`Oro of the 40th. As this hegemonic, retrogressive claim demands exclusively all the form vocabulary of the tango - from dance through fashion to music - this position can be labeled as Retro Tango. »The concept denotes a cultural phenomenon which produces pieces of art or cultural achievements in general neither based on contemporary style codes nor as their creative advancements or as original new creations, but by recourse to concepts or styles of past periods.«(cf. http://de.wikipedia.org) The Retro Tango assimilated to a curious position…

NeoTango is a complex structure of different moments of a cultural movement. It includes music, dance, visual performance, fashion and codes.

First decade NeoTango is a complex structure of different moments of a cultural movement. It includes music, dance, visual performance, fashion and codes. Although the child had many fathers (and mothers), it is undisputable that »La Revancha del Tango« by Gotan Project in 2001 was the initial impulse of this new Tango period. »Gotan Project has done just that, causing a musical revolution: sweet, sensual, passionate«. Vogue.it Later on sustained period of growth of NeoTango bands followed, whose common feature was the fusion of Tango with contemporary music genres using classical, analog and digital instruments. Orchestras like NarcoTango, Otros Aires, Bajofondo, Tanghetto - to name but a few of the best known - generated such a suction effect in the Tango scene, as well as in the music industry overall, that soon many copycats jumped on the bandwagon with musical fast-food productions. These synthetic, hastily cobbled, low-budget productions played an essential role in discrediting NeoTango as »ElectroTango«. Well visited live

performances demonstrated the creative potential of popular NeoTango bands and their rapidly increasing number of CD productions set the standard in the first decade. Their sheer bulk surged with great force against the crusted, traditionalist Tango scene and broke small NeoTango enclaves out of their phalanx of Salon-Milongas. They sustainably changed the musical taste and the hearing sensation of their concert goers and inspired Tango dancers to establish the first Neolongas  (a portmanteau of NeoTango and Milonga) from 2006. Neotango dance floors combined  New Tango songs with the dancing repertoire of the pioneers of Tango Nuevo (Veron, Chicho, Naveira, Salas, Ladas). Their CITA 2000 festival in Buenos Aires played a key role in the Tango renewal process and extensively influenced several generations of dancers, such as DIN in Buenos Aires. Their international workshops and tours spread the typical dancing style of the Open Embrace with Saccadas, Colgadas, Voltadas and Ganchos and changed the international Tango scene very intensively and profoundly.…

Intentionality designates the mental presence of objects and actions of the »real« world on the one hand, on the other hand it ́s not only a passive reflection of the concrete world but an active intervention on it motivated by action intentions.

Intentionality and Tango The term intentionality refers to the »philosophy of mind« by Brentano and the speech-act theory of Searle. Human interaction requires perception - the mental ability to notice, decode and interpret actions of the social environment to create intentionality as its mental representative. Intentionality designates the mental presence of objects and actions of the »real« world on the one hand, on the other hand it ́s not only a passive reflection of the concrete world but an active intervention on it motivated by action intentions. In Tango the action intention appears as an subjective imagination of dancing figure sequences. Due to the absence of verbal communication the collective intentionality of a couple becomes apparent in a body language expressed by steps sequences, turns of the torso or the subtle use of arm movements by the »closed embrace«. »the flow of sound, music and dance, for example, has striking resemblances to the flow of meaningful human discourse.« Erkki Soininen,

http://www.erkkisoininen.fi/aestetic.php Intentionality and Vintage Tango The dancing language of the traditional Tango is a closed dialogue curcuit with a classical sender-receiver-model of (male) leaders and (female) followers. The dancing intentionality primarily refers to a sclerotic pool of dancing figures (and their framework conditions), which dancers acquired through long-time exercises in workshops and »practicas«. This collective communication system is an indespensible prerequisite for the development of intentionality. The learning process is supported by framework conditions like the hierarchically dancing roles of leaders and followers, the closed embrace and the dancing circle on the dance floor. Intentionality and Neotango The dancing concept of Neotango turns its back on this restrictive set of dancing regulations and replaces it with a system of free improvisation. Instead of following a predefined arsenal of figures a permanent sender- sender feedback process creates impulses of movement. Additionally the dancing repertoire expands to free-flowing, multi-facetted meshes of moves by integrating contemporary dance concepts like Contact Improvisation, Butoh, Modern…

The retrenchment takes the form of extremely simple dancing in which the focus of the dance is not on interesting improvisation, but on musicality, and specifically rhythmic musicality accompanied by quite bigoted claims about any other values and priorities which could be pursued while dancing tango. It also involves an extremely narrow subset of tango music, eschewing contemporary orquestras, post-1950s compositions, and world music. In Berlin one gets the sense that the line of dance is more important than what you are doing in it. This is called “social tango”.

A few years ago, tango began a retrenchment. I first noticed it oozing from New York dancers visiting Boston in 2009, but soon saw it in Buenos Aires, felt its venom in Wellington and Sydney, and am now confronted with it regularly even here in radical Berlin. The retrenchment takes the form of extremely simple dancing in which the focus of the dance is not on interesting improvisation, but on musicality, and specifically rhythmic musicality accompanied by quite bigoted claims about any other values and priorities which could be pursued while dancing tango. It also involves an extremely narrow subset of tango music, eschewing contemporary orquestras, post-1950s compositions, and world music. In Berlin one gets the sense that the line of dance is more important than what you are doing in it. This is called “social tango”. That is the form. But I believe the substance of the retrenchment is sexism. Last week I interviewed Andreas. I love to dance

with him because he’s one of the few people who operates in a tango context with something approaching expressive freedom. It was he who used the term ‘Victorian’. I’ve been dancing about 8 years.  Here in Berlin there used to be much more creativity in the dancing.  Now there is a new tendency to  limit the range of moving the body in spite of all the skills we learned from 100 years of contemporary dance or Modern dance, (M. Graham, M. Cunnigham, P.Bausch….) and Tango Nuevo to open the body, to liberate the move, to explore movement in any direction, to learn from other disciplines.  And what’s strange is that it’s mostly the young people!  The dance in the classical scene remembers me sometimes of a new kind of Neo-Victorians.  The new ideal is not to open their legs too much, to make small, elegant, controlled movements.  They don’t want their bodies to move too much, too big, too expressive;…